Brownstein Focuses On Containing Health Care Costs

Over the weekend, the Atlantic's Ron Brownstein penned an important piece on the cost containment measures in health care reform legislation released by Senator Harry Reid. The consensus amongst economists that he talked to is that Reid did a pretty good job. 

When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way, page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won't succeed unless it "bends the curve" in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he likes it a lot.

"I'm sort of a known skeptic on this stuff," Gruber told me. "My summary is it's really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can't think of a thing to try that they didn't try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here....I can't think of anything I'd do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn't have done better than they are doing."

Gruber may be especially effusive. But the Senate blueprint, which faces its first votes tonight, also is winning praise from other leading health reformers like Mark McClellan, the former director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush and Len Nichols, health policy director at the centrist New America Foundation. "The bottom line," Nichols says, "is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end."

Of course more could be done to cut costs, more can always be done, and I'd imagine that even after a reform bill is passed, we'll still have to come back to the cost question relatively soon. Having said that, the Senate bill seems to make a solid effort at cutting health care costs, which have been one of the main drags on wages and job creation over at least the past decade. Containing these costs has to be a crucial part of a new economic strategy for America going forward and is the core economic logic for health care reform. The whole piece is worth a read, as is Rob Shapiro's recent blog pointing out the political ramifications of not containing healthcare costs in the years to come.

Update: Ben Smith reports that President Obama has declared Brownstein's piece "mandatory reading for all senior staff."